Footsucker

Nine

The story of Cinderella is a primary myth for all foot and shoe fetishists, but there are a lot of problems that go with it. At its simplest level, and even to the most unideological observer, it must seem to be peddling some unpleasant nonsense about class and romantic love. The idea that a woman might change her life utterly and for the better simply by dressing up in finery and attending a ball so that she can become a prince’s object of desire, is one that we find as suspect as we do improbable. But, of course, it’s the glass slipper that really interests me.

How does the slipper come to be so crucial in the story? The prince, let’s remember, has spent a certain amount of time with Cinderella. He’s talked to her, heard her voice, seen her face, has surely had time enough to gain some sense of her personality. Yet when he begins his search for her, such attributes as personality, face and voice are wholly ignored. He is simply searching for the owner of a certain foot, a foot that will fit the glass slipper she left behind.

It is well known that in Perrault’s original French fairytale the slipper is made of fur not glass. Now, there’s no shortage of sexual overtones in a fur slipper. Pubic hair is invoked, the interaction of human and animal skin is suggested, and the penetration of a fur opening by a woman’s foot is certainly ripe with perverse symbolism. But the plot of Cinderella revolves around the slipper fitting only one woman, and the fact is that fur is soft, yielding and could be stretched to fit any number of differently sized feet. A glass slipper, being rigid, has a far more specific fit, and is far less accommodating than fur.

However, if we accept that the slipper is being used as some kind of vaginal symbol, a fur one is surely more serviceable than a glass one. Glass is brittle. It breaks. It is potentially dangerous. One could so easily smash the vessel and cut oneself.

The role of the slipper is made even more complex and perverse, because it’s the prince who’s the possessor of this symbolic vagina. It belonged to Cinderella but she has run from it, left it behind. When the prince begins his search it’s the women of the kingdom who must perform an act of penetration, who must insert their foot into this fragile glass opening that he carries with him.

This is a highly unusual and unlikely way of talking about heterosexual intercourse. The prince is active in his search for the foot, but entirely passive at the moment of insertion. We might easily convince ourselves that the prince is, in some sense, searching for a phallus, but, if so, it’s interesting that he’s in search of a small, delicate one.

The behaviour of the ugly sisters contains all manner of weirdness too. They know that their feet are too big and ugly for the glass slipper, and, in a later version of the story, they actually have parts of their feet amputated so that they’ll be small enough to fit into it. In one case it’s the heel, in the other, more alarmingly, it’s the big toe. Taken simply as an act of self-mutilation this is shocking enough, but if we allow the foot to be considered as a phallic substitute, the idea becomes one of hysterical violence. Not that the prince is fooled. Cosmetic surgery is no good. The foot must conform to specific criteria but it has to be that way naturally.

But does the whole business of the glass slipper work anyway? It is possible that there is something going on here that we could call poetic licence, but we might just as easily call it a clumsy plot device. And given that glass is an improvement on fur, surely it’s not credible that a shoe, even when made of glass, however carefully fashioned, however specific to the wearer, would really only fit one woman in the whole kingdom.

Yes, everyone’s feet are unique, and if the prince, for example, had taken a Polaroid of Cinderella’s feet and gone round the kingdom in search of feet that matched the photograph, then he might well have tracked down Cinderella. But he was just relying on size and shape. How many shoe sizes are there? How many width fittings? How many defining features? Not many. It’s hard to imagine a foot so singular that a shoe could be fashioned that would fit this foot and no other.

And here it seems to me the glass slipper functions in yet another way. Glass is transparent. When the glass slipper is on. Cinderella’s foot, the foot, by definition, remains entirely visible. The foot is contained, restrained, reshaped by the slipper, possibly a little squashed and pushed around, yet every feature can still be seen.

But let’s think about Cinderella’s feet. She is forced to be a drudge. In English pantomime she is usually to be found barefoot in the kitchen, by the fireplace. And her main job, of course, is to sweep up cinders. However delicate and small and special those feet of hers may be, they will not be clean. They would have been made dirty by treading in ash and coal dust. During the fairy godmother’s transformation it is possible to suppose they were made clean by the power of magic, but by the time the prince arrives they would certainly be dirty again.

The prince holds out the delicate glass slipper and Cinderella places her perfect but soiled foot inside it. The long sought fit is achieved. The prince sees the object of his desire encased in glass like a museum specimen. The sullied sexual object is made safe, put behind glass. The prince can see its every detail, but he doesn’t need to touch it, indeed he doesn’t want to. It is as though the foot is varnished, set in colourless amber. However much he loves it, he won’t get his hands or anything else dirty. The man is obviously a fool.

All this Cinderella business was brought into idiosyncratic focus the day I first met Harold Wilmer and had my life changed. Harold was a small, trim, compact man. He must have been sixty years old and yet he was as slight and as lean as a teenager. His face was thin, though hardly wrinkled, and he looked as though he would scarcely ever need to shave. He had the air of a man who might once have been seriously ill. The illness was cured but it had left him brittle. You would not have mistaken him for a happy man, but it seemed to me that he was touched with melancholy, not misery.

His hair was threadbare and his eyes were tired, but he was dapper and alert, and he sat at his workbench wearing a tie and tweed waistcoat under his stained apron. He might have been mistaken for a jeweller or a taxidermist, and I suppose his work had something in common with both those trades, but in fact he was a bespoke shoemaker.

I know a little about shoemaking; not enough to be able to make a shoe, probably not even enough to give instructions to a shoemaker, but I like to think I have enough knowledge of the techniques of shoemaking to be able to appreciate other people’s mastery of those techniques. I know that shoemaking is not what it was, that it’s become a dying art. Automation and synthetic fabrics have made a lot of the old skills superfluous. Good shoemakers are a rare breed and in danger of extinction.

I know roughly how a shoe should be constructed. First a pattern is made, and this pattern is then cut from the sheet of leather or fabric. This is a highly skilled job and needs to be in tune with the grain and thickness of the material. Once cut, the various upper parts are stitched together, then moulded on a last and brought together with the insole. The sole and heel are then attached, the sock lining inserted and the shoe can come off the last for finishing, i.e. waterproofing, polishing, decorating. That at least is what I’d read in the textbooks. My knowledge was anything but practical.

I have always enjoyed the language of shoemaking. It seems strange and dark and contradictory. For example, the way a shoe is ‘lasted’ then ‘finished’. The man who cuts up the skins is known as the ‘clicker’. And much of the vocabulary seems potent and mysterious; words like the ‘welt’, the ‘shank’, the ‘vamp’.

My knowledge was very useful when I first met Harold. It stopped him thinking I was a fool or a time-waster. I had been aware of his shop long before I was aware of him. I sometimes walked past it on my way to work. It was a small, old-fashioned, bay-fronted establishment, the window always full of clutter: lasts, brushes, shoe-expanders, shoe trees, bottles and tins of leather oil, liquid wax, hide food, dubbin, and a kind of polish called Parade Gloss. His name and his trade, ‘bespoke shoemaker’, were painted on the glass in gold leaf.

Since he made shoes individually and to order there was never an array of stock in the window, but occasionally a pair of elegantly constructed brogues or riding boots would make a brief appearance while waiting to be collected. This was not the kind of shoemaking I was interested in. I was scarcely even aware that he made shoes for women at all, but then one day I was walking past his window and saw the most extraordinary pair of women’s shoes.

The heels were long and slender, tapering almost to a point, and were made of some kind of burnished red metal. The shoes had peep-toes, the opening more or less semicircular, the edge of that opening, and the edge of the shoe’s mouth, again braided with the same red metal. The body of the shoe was made out of some supremely soft inky black leather, but a tracery of thin red-metal filaments ran across it, less regular than a spider’s web, more like spilled wax. The back of the shoe was high and from it emerged two strands of leather, one red, one black, to be tied together as an ankle strap.

Everything about the shoes was remarkable — the extravagance, the richness of the shape and materials — and, even seen through the window, the workmanship was obviously exquisite. They looked totally, indecently out of place, these fierce but wholly feminine objects set amidst the dusty clutter of the rest of the window display. I certainly wanted to buy them for Catherine, but I think it was curiosity as much as anything else that made me enter the shop. How did such outlandish objects come to be here? Who had made them? How was it I had never come across them before?’

I went into the shop and that was when I met Harold Wilmer for the first time. A counter confronted you as soon as you entered, and a long way back in the rear of the premises was a workshop. Here Harold was to be seen sitting at a small workbench, cutting out pieces of leather. He looked up quickly when he saw me and immediately stopped what he was doing, but it took a long time for him to stand up and come to the counter. Even when he arrived he didn’t say anything or ask me what I wanted, but he stared at me hard.

I said, ‘I’m interested in those shoes in the window.’ Still nothing from him, so I said, ‘The red and black ones. The women’s shoes. For my girlfriend. I was wondering what size they were. How much they cost.’

I don’t know why I spoke so hesitantly. I had bought women’s shoes often enough before. Harold still didn’t say anything but he ambled over to the shop window and with a lot of effort carefully extracted the shoes. He handled them roughly but with affection and held them out so I could look at them.

There was nothing soft or boyish about Harold’s hands. They were dark and gnarled, as stained and tanned as some of the leather he worked with. They were an old man’s hands and decades of work had made them strong and specialized. The grain stood out, revealing a pattern of small scars, gashes, crescents, healed flaps of skin where knives had slipped and cut into his flesh. And yet they had delicacy, were obviously capable of intricate, detailed work.

I looked at the shoes more carefully. Up close the standard of workmanship was even more extraordinary. I reached out to take them from him, but he held them back. They were for my eyes only. They looked as though they were more or less the right size to fit Catherine, and even if they hadn’t been, they would still have been exquisite examples to own, have around and include in the archive. I peered inside to see whether they had a size. They didn’t, but they did have the maker’s mark, one I had seen before; the outline of a footprint with a lightning flash at its centre.

‘I’ll take them,’ I said.

Harold ignored me and replied, ‘I don’t feel absolutely comfortable about selling them, you know.’

‘No?’

‘I made them for a client, a long-standing client. Unfortunately she doesn’t have any use for them now. She died before I could finish them.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said automatically.

‘I don’t see why. The sorrow is all mine. It was a pleasure to make shoes for her. More than a pleasure.’

The mention of his dead client had pitched him into a sudden and profound depression. I really didn’t need this. I just wanted to buy the shoes. I didn’t even much care what the price was. I certainly didn’t want to get involved with some stranger’s personal tragedy. I did my best to change the subject. I said, ‘I’ve been past your shop before, but I never realized you made women’s shoes.’

‘Ladies, women,’ he said. ‘I don’t care so long as they’re appreciative.’

He looked down at the shoes he was holding, then at me.

‘I know it sounds absurd,’ he said, ‘but I’d like to be sure these shoes will be going to a good home.’

This was crazy. What did he want from me? It’s no easy business to convince someone that you are a worthy possessor of their handmade shoes, and I wasn’t keen to try. On the other hand I did want to make the purchase. All I could say was, ‘I think my girlfriend would be very appreciative indeed.’

He looked at me even more closely, as though by examining me he would be able to learn what kind of woman I might be involved with.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘They were in the window. Let’s do business. How much do you want for them?’

‘It’s not a question of money,’ he said.

Oh, Jesus, I thought to myself, what does he want me to do? Undergo an initiation rite?

‘I’m not selling these shoes because I need the cash,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’m tempted to keep them. But I happen to believe that a shoe needs to function before I can consider it a success. Shoes have to be worn before they can live. I want my shoes to live.’

I nodded. What he said made perfect sense to me. It was a sentiment I shared, but I didn’t want to agree too readily in case he thought I was trying to con him into parting with the shoes.

He said, ‘I wouldn’t want you to buy them blind. You bring your young lady in and let her try them on. We’ll see if they’re a fit.’

I realized he was talking about something far more subtle and complex than the matter of foot size. It seemed to me that he wanted to be sure that Catherine fitted the shoes rather than vice versa. It occurred to me to tell him that Catherine already owned a pair of his shoes, but I resisted on the grounds that he might well be insulted to learn that his work had turned up in a second-hand clothes shop in Islington. However, I didn’t have the slightest doubt that Catherine would measure up to any standard he cared to set. Whether she would want to participate in this charade was another matter altogether.

She took some persuading. She didn’t want to play games with some cranky old shoemaker. Furthermore she said, reasonably enough, the chances of the shoes fitting her were remote. Who did I think she was? Cinderella? And, even if they did fit, she wasn’t sure she wanted to wear a dead woman’s shoes. She said she might not like the shoes, but I assured her there wasn’t the slightest chance of that. What actually clinched it was telling her that the shoes contained the same trade mark as her zebra-skin ones. Those shoes, she said, were the sexiest, best-fitting shoes she’d ever owned. Finally, though still a little warily, she agreed to come with me.

A couple of days later we went to the shop. The shoes were not in the window and I wondered at first whether we’d waited too long, whether some more persuasive customer had beaten us to it and talked Harold into selling them. We entered the shop. Harold looked up, saw us, and said, perhaps sarcastically, ‘Ah, my latest customers.’

I introduced Catherine. He looked her up and down. It was not prurient, not even sexual, and yet his gaze seemed to strip her bare of everything but essentials. He motioned for her to come in behind the counter, into his work area, and to sit down on a blue velvet banquette that was installed there. The moment she was seated he squatted at her feet and removed the shoes she was wearing, strappy sandals, nothing too extreme. He took her bare feet in his old dark hands and touched them carefully. Again there was nothing lascivious in his manner and yet it was an act of great intimacy. Harold’s gnarled, scarred fingers squeezed, stroked and examined Catherine’s feet. He traced the paths of veins and muscles, bent the toes back and forth gently so he could see the way they moved and functioned. He didn’t smile or look pleased. It was too serious a matter for that. He appeared professional, disinterested, but at last he nodded to himself in satisfaction.

He went to a locker, opened it, got out the red and black shoes and brought them for Catherine. I could tell immediately that she liked them. Harold slipped the shoes on to her feet. Her pale skin lay in stark contrast to the soft, dark leather and the metal tracery. Most important, the shoes fitted perfectly, absolutely perfectly. They could have been made for her. At the time that didn’t seem so strange; I knew that, unlike Cinderella’s glass slipper, there were any number of women whose feet these shoes would have fitted.

Catherine stood up and paced across the workshop while Harold and I watched intently, though with our different forms of fascination. I was looking through the eyes of a lover. He, I thought, was looking through the eyes of a craftsman. But we were both delighted, as was Catherine. She said she loved both the look and the feel. She went back and forth a few more times, her walk becoming a feline, predatory stalk. Then she smiled at Harold and, in his ancient, boyish, uncertain way, he smiled back.

‘They’re something special,’ she said.

Harold nodded in agreement. He was pleased that she liked them, but I got the feeling it was she who was being judged not the shoes. Harold did not need anyone else’s opinion to confirm the worth of what he had made.

‘You can have the shoes,’ he said, and Catherine and I responded enthusiastically. We had passed the test and been found worthy: a slightly absurd test it seemed, but at least we could now pay, take the shoes and go.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘They’re my present to you,’ Harold said. ‘My gift.’

I said, hold on, I couldn’t possibly accept them for free. That was partly because I didn’t want to take advantage of the old man, but more importantly because I didn’t want to feel beholden to him. But he wasn’t having any of it.

He said, ‘I put those shoes in the window hoping that they’d attract the right sort of customer. And they have. You’re here. They’re yours. I’m delighted. But there’s one condition.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No conditions. Let’s keep this businesslike. Let me give you some money.’

Ignoring me he turned to Catherine and said, ‘The condition is that you let me continue to make shoes for you.’

‘What kind of shoes?’ she asked.

‘Any shoes I like. Anything and everything I want. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. And I wouldn’t charge you for those shoes either.’

I looked at Catherine. Given her reluctance to come to the shop in the first place, I assumed she’d find the idea of ‘conditions’ as objectionable as I did. But she was now strutting around the place, modelling the shoes, looking and behaving like a sex queen, a smile of utter, indecent pleasure plastered across her face. There was no doubt that she’d agree.

‘Harold,’ she said. ‘This could be the start of something big.’

When we got back to Catherine’s flat, we took the shoes out of their tissue-lined box and set them on a glass table in the middle of the living room. Normally I would have had the immediate desire to christen a pair of newly acquired shoes, to use them as an essential part of some sexual act or performance. But these shoes from Harold Wilmer produced a curious sort of inaction, a stasis. You had to pause, stop dead, and admire them.

‘They’re some shoes,’ said Catherine.

‘They are,’ I agreed.

‘It’s a pity Harold’s so creepy.’

‘Yes, he is a bit creepy, isn’t he?’ I said.

‘I wonder who he made the shoes for. Who she was. What happened to her? How did she die?’

‘I wonder what happened to the rest of her shoes.’

‘It’s a pity you’re so creepy too,’ she said.

She was making a joke, but a part of her obviously meant it.

‘I thought my creepiness was what attracted you to me,’ I said.

She didn’t have a ready answer for that.

‘I guess we needn’t ever go back to Harold’s shop,’ she said after a while. ‘I mean we have the shoes, right?’

‘That wouldn’t be fair,’ I said.

‘I guess not,’ she said. ‘A deal’s a deal. Besides, he does make amazing shoes. Where else are we going to get more shoes like this? For free.’

I frowned. That part of the bargain was still worrying me.

‘I don’t like to get something for nothing,’ I said. ‘There’s no such thing. We’ll have to find a way of paying him. If he won’t take money we’ll have to give him something else. Food hampers or sweaters or whatever else he does for kicks.’

‘Are you sure he does anything for kicks?’

‘Everybody does something,’ I replied.

Catherine seemed to be considering this proposition but then a new thought struck her.

‘Hey,’ she said, ‘when we stop seeing each other, who gets custody of the shoes? You or me?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe we could not stop seeing each other.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I suspect that isn’t an option.’